Apps and Heal Point Simulations and More
It's the feature you didn't know you needed!
Before we get into Week 6, there's some housekeeping.
The Android App
After some stupid delays (thanks, Google), the Android version of the app is up and running. It's the exact same app as the iPhone version, so now you can use it on your platform of choice.
Heals, etc, are behind the paywall on there for $3.99/month. You can purchase that via the apps or if you're a Varsity subscriber you can use the code at the bottom of this email.
Maine Basketball Rankings
LUCAS S MCNELLY
The Podcast
This week on the podcast, Washington Academy's Jon Solomon joined me to talk about WA's many trips across the state to play football and how they show up ready to play after hours on a bus, whether he's the Jack Kerouac or Neal Cassady of the operation, the value of the football coaching fraternity, WA's awesome volleyball team, and a whole lot more.
Heal Point Calculator
If you're reading this, you're probably familiar with the Tourney Odds that tell you the likelihood of finishing as each seed at the end of the regular season.
But now, you can answer the age-old question of "what if we win this game and this game, but lose that game and this team wins the rest of their games?" The new Playoff Calculator will do exactly that.
Bring up your sport and region and it'll show you the current Tourney Odds. Then on the right, you can start picking winners and the Tourney Odds will change based on your picks.
Basically it's ESPN's playoff simulator, but for Heal Points.
Apologies for your productivity at work.
Lucas McNelly
If you haven't upgraded, what are you waiting for?
There's a new game for your NBA obsessions.
This gives you cards of players and clues to unlock to help you decide if you should "cut or sign" the player. The clue might tell you the player won 3 MVPs, but it might just tell you who one of their teammates was. So you might accidentally cut LeBron. The goal is to beat the Dream Team.
I had a lineup with Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain and that lineup wasn't good enough and those guys on the same team aren't losing to anyone.
You might remember how back in 2020, sportscaster (and Maine legend) Bill Green inserted himself in the Senate race between Susan Collins and Sara Gideon with a series of ads. I was very critical of the decision at the time.
The ads were widely credited with impacting the race. The Columbia Journalism Review did a postmortem on the whole thing back in 2020.
Crossing the Rubicon from journalism to political player didn’t come easy to Green. “It was like walking a plank, because I’m not a journalist [anymore],” he says. “I knew I couldn’t go back on Channel 6 after doing that. I knew I couldn’t go back and be a straight journalist.”
Channel 6, for their part, has been re-running all the episodes of Bill Green's Maine and Green still does the journalism people expect of him, just in a different format.
He caught a lot of flak for the endorsement from people (not just me) – NEWSCenter had to distance themselves from it – and got even more flak after going negative in the final days of the campaign and insinuating Gideon wasn't "Maine enough", which everyone knows is Tim Sample's job.
At the time, he called it a one and done foray into politics.
“I’m retired, and if I want to speak out about something I’m going to speak out on it, but I don’t have any plans to do anything like this again,
And yet...
Michael Shepherd
I talked to a number of people in journalism about this and the reactions ranged from "yes, you could do that...but should you?" to pissed off.
It's easy to argue that you're a retired journalist (harder when you still link your old job on Twitter), but there's a point where it doesn't matter anymore. If you took a job at the Press Herald and worked a beat for 10 years before getting burnt out by the grind and getting a better-paying job, then you could probably turn around a couple of years later and endorse a candidate and it wouldn't be that big of a deal. But if you were on the air for 50 years and for 50 years people invited you into their homes and trusted you to bring them stories of the "real Maine", then it doesn't matter if you're retired or not. You're that journalist until the day you die and beyond (lest your children get any ideas). Bobby Cox will always be the manager of the Braves. When you endorse a candidate after 50 years on air, including a show where your name is in the title, you are endorsing with the full weight of that career. You don't get to step outside the lines and say you aren't playing anymore. You're in the game for good.
So how do you know if it's ok? Because there's a lot of space between that kid who did 10 years at the PPH and Bill Green. It's simple: if they ask you, you absolutely should not do it. Because they won't ask that kid for his endorsement. It doesn't matter. But if they ask, that's because your career as a journalist meant something. They aren't asking because you sat on a board for the Maine Sports Hall of Fame or are friends with the candidate or anything like that. They're asking because you hosted "Bill Green's Maine" and families from Kittery to Fort Kent trusted you to give them the real Maine.
They are leveraging your career in journalism for political purposes. Full stop. To think otherwise is naive.
Will it move the needle? Maybe they'll cover that on NEWSCenter's show "Wanna Bet?, another questionable bit of "journalism". Should a pair of newscasters be giving out gambling tips on the air? I think that also falls under the heading of "Yes, you could do that...but should you?" You probably shouldn't. Especially if your station isn't even covering sports anymore. It's a dark timeline where a TV news station thinks it's ok to completely cut sports coverage and perfectly ok to have two of their anchors tell people how to gamble on sports.
Maybe NEWSCenter needs an ombudsman?
I'll just say that when I hear someone's opinion on this, it tells me a lot about them and nothing about Irsay-Gordon.
Mark Maske
One of the legends of cinema, Eva Marie Saint, passed away this week at the age of 102.
Greg Evans
If you haven't seen On the Waterfront or North by Northwest, you should fix that.
There's a couple of good football games on today's schedule, but for the Game of the Day, let's go to fútbol, where Brunswick and Lewiston are battling for the 1 seed in A North.
Brunswick beat Lewiston on the road on the 29th of September, 3-2, but are still below them in the Heal Points, thanks to Lewiston's tougher schedule.
A Brunswick win essentially locks up the 1 seed. Lewiston will need a win and at least one more. At least, that's what the playoff calculator says.
The rest of the Model's picks for today's games are after the jump.